How to decrease the number of spawned vehicles

[medopu]

Hi,

I'd like to know if you came across a mod that would decrease the frequency of trucks/cars because

a) It feels stupid and wrong building ringroads and massive intersections for towns of 10,000 inhabitants. I mean, come on!!!

b) I have a really really shitty pc, and it would probably benefit performance with less cars per city size

c) With a decreased frequency of vehicles per house/industry, the agent limit would be hit in a later stage of the game than it does now so that there would be a more steady progression in traffic density and playable time in which a growing city corresponds with denser traffic. Look at the graph.

If there isn't such a mod, do you think there should be one for the reasons I stated above? What's your take on this?

 

[ristosal]

a) It feels stupid and wrong building ringroads and massive intersections for towns of 10,000 inhabitants. I mean, come on!

At a city of 35 000 people I haven't had the need to build almost any extra highways (smaller bypass roads yes), so this makes me wondering if you're neglecting some things in the game. An efficient public transport network takes hundreds of cars off the streets.

Cities in this game are like scaled down versions of their real-life counterparts. I know there's a realistic population mod available, but I don't know the details of it. I think growing the city can be annoyingly slow with it though.

 

[KnightHawkTFC]

FYI vehicle limit is actually 16384k not 65k.
If you have a 10k pop city and are running into massive amount of cars\traffic...you're not designing your city\road remotely efficiently, at least not for the way the game works. As ristosal mentioned though public transport, paths (bike or walking), can cut down on cars.
/just saying

realistic population mod, can help with this even more if you tweak the % chance of use of cars for the different groups, though I don't use the full mod, just the cut-down version for changing capacities for offices\residences, but I did play around with full version for awhile it seemed to do what it said it with regard to travel choices.

 

[medopu]

I think you guys misunderstood me a bit. I'm talking about traffic density and not traffic congestion.

Traffic jams are not my problem. I know how to deal with them. Busses, metro, more highway connection points and so on ...

The issue is that the level of transportation infrastructure necessary to sustain a normal flow of traffic in oversized villages of 10-20k population is a bit much as far as this game requires you to plan.I have nothing against that from a gameplay perspective, I'm just trying to suit the game to my needs and my shitty laptop specs to enhance the playability and immersion from my point of view.

I've subscribed to this realistic population mod a few months ago, but forgot about it after a while. AFAIK It does exactly what it says, it reduces the house capacities and consumption, but I don't believe it also impacts the amount of vehicles spawned (correct me if i'm wrong).

FYI vehicle limit is actually 16384k not 65k.

Sorry, my bad i mixed the agent limit with vehicle limit. Yes, the vehicle limit is even lower but my point remains the same. I basically want to go about modifying the number of vehicles spawned per amount of people, shops and industries present.

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

FYI vehicle limit is actually 16384k not 65k

So over 16 million? That is a lot if correct. Or should that have not had the "k" on the end?

 

[MarkJohnson]

It is 16k traffic(vehicles) and 64k citizens(pedestrians) or 80k total agents.

I don't know of a mod to do what you want. I find if you micro manage your zoning you can cut down agents tremendously. This is an agent based simulator, so you need to gen agents from point A to point B in a timely manner or bad things happen. So if you keep things somewhat close together, they will quickly get off the road, thius keeping agents low.

I find if I build a quarter or so of a tile (1km x 1km), with half industry and the other half commerce, that industry can't fully deliver to the opposite end of the quadrant, let alone 1 full tile, not to mention 5 tiles. Then it has to import it from the outside connections. As you can see the game is very limited, probably to keep agents low and save on processing power for the other aspects of the game.

I find the game despawns and just outright prevents traffic to keep agents low. The biggest hurdle is letting your city mature to maximum building levels as fast as possible. Once at max, traffic subsides to near nothing, if the zones are in relative balance. Most traffic is spawned as buildings grow. When they gain a level they evacuate the residents, then call in more demand for the empty buildings, and it does this over and over until max level is reached. Once reached, the traffic dies down to almost nothing.

On one of the updates, they added demand for the outside connections and it is hard to keep these under control early on. Later in game they seem to merge with your city demands as well as you will be unable to control all of the agents. Especially if you go outside of the 9-tile that are the default of the game and the AI designed to handle.

I've inquired about this scaling of agents as many people either don't want them so they can be able to freely build without dealing with the gaming aspects, or for under powered rigs (i.e. mobile), but never found anything for it yet. It is in very high demand as most users want a photoshop game, rather than a strategic game.

As it stands, with all of the games updates, the minimum requirement are too low and unrealistic to be playable on a 9-tile city, let alone just starting a new, empty map.

 

[benzoll]

Mod "Realistic Population and Consumption" causes double vehicles in the city.
A mod that does many things, and one of them is to reduce vehicles/traffic in general, is "Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance v2.1":
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=654707599
Both are from the same author (Whitefang Greytail).

 

[medopu]

Great posts guys! Very informative.

I find the game despawns and just outright prevents traffic to keep agents low.

Wouldn't it therefore also be theoretically possible to make a mod and despawn even more vehicles, so that the vehicle limit gets hit more gradually/slowly?

On one of the updates, they added demand for the outside connections and it is hard to keep these under control early on.

That's first time i hear such things as the demand for outside connections. What does it do exactly?

I find if you micro manage your zoning you can cut down agents tremendously.

I sort of do that already. I mix the residential with commercial zones to minimize the travelling distance, but this is sort of impossible for industry, as you can't really start zoning in industry without the heavy consequences of noise pollution and area degradation. And it's industry that requires the heaviest network infrastructure at least in my experience.

Mod "Realistic Population and Consumption" causes double vehicles in the city.
A mod that does many things, and one of them is to reduce vehicles/traffic in general, is "Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance v2.1":
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=654707599
Both are from the same author (Whitefang Greytail).

I would argue that what CLR does is prevent traffic spikes due to deathwaves, I'm not so sure that it also decreases the number of vehicles in general (in accordance with the population of the city). Are you sure about that?

 

[benzoll]

Of course, "CLR" is awesome mod. I only modify one thing in mod : I put vanilla traffic.
I do not use "Realistic Population and Consumption".

 

[MarkJohnson]

Wouldn't it therefore also be theoretically possible to make a mod and despawn even more vehicles, so that the vehicle limit gets hit more gradually/slowly?

It theory it's possible, but in practice, unless it's given in the modding api, otherwise you'll have to find it in the massive code, and in all possible locations. Then keep updating it with every single patch released. This was the problem with raising the agent limits in the game to more than 16k. It was deemed possible, but too much work to make it work. Then it turned out it was the 16-bit arrays that not only had 64k limits, but arrays are shared with other data to optimise the game a little more. So it would cause problems if you did accomplish the task.

This could be a reason for despawning. There are so many ways the game despawns, it may take a large amount of resouces to do.

I know a few despawning tactics.

1) despawn agents if they get delayed in traffic.
2) not spawn agents if it is predetermined it can't make it's destination.
3) teleport workers to work if they can't make it so economy doesn't collapse.
4) don't spawn unemployed workers so economy doesn't crash, with pay!.
5) Don't spawn agents if building is mature. It only spawns thing out of balance.

There are more I can't recall.

That's first time i hear such things as the demand for outside connections. What does it do exactly?

On an empty map, you will have traffic going from one outside connection to another and have a large amount of traffic at the start. It is very noticeable if you have a highway already through your start tile. Or if you have a highway on both sides of your starting tile and you connect the two together.

But they just demand all of the things your city does. tourism, workers, freight, etc.

I sort of do that already. I mix the residential with commercial zones to minimize the travelling distance, but this is sort of impossible for industry, as you can't really start zoning in industry without the heavy consequences of noise pollution and area degradation. And it's industry that requires the heaviest network infrastructure at least in my experience.

Commerce makes noise pollution so you should be two - 4x4 tiles away or you get complaining cims and it will take extra happiness to level up buildings.

Industry need to also be only two - 4x4 tikles away to avoid pollution. So residential can be very close with zero consequences. You can however still zone commerce and offices directly across the street from industry with no ill affects other than the ground pollution causing lower land values which you can make up for with extra happiness buildings in the vicinity. It's less about noise pollution, and more about ground pollution.

 

[medopu]

It theory it's possible, but in practice, unless it's given in the modding api, otherwise

Yes, it does seem an impossible task, for me at least.
Alternatively, I also thought that perhaps you could take the previously mentioned "realistic population mod", reduce the amount of jobs/residents per building even further (for all building levels) and artificially inflate that number to basically fool the player into believing it has a larger population than it actually does agent-wise. Basically what SC2013 already did in a sense. It would be a very dirty trick but it could work for someone like me, I believe. Toying with the spawning mechanic does seem to be too much hard work for gains provided.

But they just demand all of the things your city does. tourism, workers, freight, etc.

Oh i see. I never tested this though but what does this "invisible demand" even entail. I don't believe I experienced much of a difference in my city growth whether I played a map with a low amount of connections or a map with plenty of connections, but I could be wrong as I haven't tested this much, it's just a very subjective experience from my point of view.

Industry need to also be only two - 4x4 tikles away to avoid pollution. So residential can be very close with zero consequences. You can however still zone commerce and offices directly across the street from industry with no ill affects other than the ground pollution causing lower land values which you can make up for with extra happiness buildings in the vicinity. It's less about noise pollution, and more about ground pollution.

Yes, that aspect of the game does seem to be overly forgiving. I do believe pollution should play a more crucial role as a decreasing factor in land-value. Nobody wants to live in smog, not even with miles and miles of parks and hospitals.

 

[MarkJohnson]

Yes, it does seem an impossible task, for me at least.
Alternatively, I also thought that perhaps you could take the previously mentioned "realistic population mod", reduce the amount of jobs/residents per building even further (for all building levels) and artificially inflate that number to basically fool the player into believing it has a larger population than it actually does agent-wise. Basically what SC2013 already did in a sense. It would be a very dirty trick but it could work for someone like me, I believe. Toying with the spawning mechanic does seem to be too much hard work for gains provided.

I belive there is a fudge population mod made during release. Not sure if it was just poking fun at EA, or it actually does something like you want.

Also, this game kind of already does what SC2013 did, just in a different way. i.e. It doesn't spawn cims to keep agets low. SC2013 doesn't despawn, so it scales up population instead.

CSL doesn't spawn shoppers or students. Another way to keep agents low. Especially commerce, as with no shoppers you do not need commerce at all, which means you don't need industry at all. You can jusr build residential and Offices only if you want. Then you can add commerce/industry for cosmetics.

Oh i see. I never tested this though but what does this "invisible demand" even entail. I don't believe I experienced much of a difference in my city growth whether I played a map with a low amount of connections or a map with plenty of connections, but I could be wrong as I haven't tested this much, it's just a very subjective experience from my point of view.

Not sure what you mean. Demand just means each outside connections create false demands at the start of the gazme to give you an illusion of a bustling city at the start and not a barren wasteland.

Not sure how this false demand changes as your city grows. Sometimes it gets worse for me, other times it dwindles down a lot. wel, at least in comparison of my large 300k+ city is concerned.

FYI, the game starts with, up to, 4 highway connects and 4 rail connections. But mods can add more. Check BloodyPenguin's workshop page for very, very good mods that are quickly update with each update. He does great work and is very reliable.

Yes, that aspect of the game does seem to be overly forgiving. I do believe pollution should play a more crucial role as a decreasing factor in land-value. Nobody wants to live in smog, not even with miles and miles of parks and hospitals.

Yes, pollution doesn't keep spreading like SC20123 and doesn't have air pollution on top of it like SC2013, it replaces air pollution with the useless, but sometimes annoying sound pollution. It doesn't seem to have any real effects on the city except a constant nagging of icons, and lower land values slightly, but easily remedies with an extra happiness building or two.

 

[KnightHawkTFC]

So over 16 million? That is a lot if correct. Or should that have not had the "k" on the end?

lol I added a k where clearly it didn't belong. 16,384. I'm pretty sure I first wrote '16k' then went back and changed it to the full figure thinking someone was gonna say 'wrong it's 16384'. lol

 

[KnightHawkTFC]

Mod "Realistic Population and Consumption" causes double vehicles in the city.
A mod that does many things, and one of them is to reduce vehicles/traffic in general, is "Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance v2.1":
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=654707599
Both are from the same author (Whitefang Greytail).

100% yup... me mixed up the names, it's lifecycle I use.

 

[KnightHawkTFC]

I find the game despawns and just outright prevents traffic to keep agents low.

No, it really doesn't, it'll only does that when they can't get there, can't get there in timely manner, and other things (you mentioned them later) it does not take the number of vehicles or agents in use at the time as far as I recall at all into account in such decisions.

Commerce makes noise pollution so you should be two - 4x4 tiles away or you get complaining cims and it will take extra happiness to level up buildings.

This should be in every decent tutorial about the game, but rarely do I see it mentioned much.

Alternatively, I also thought that perhaps you could take the previously mentioned "realistic population mod", reduce the amount of jobs/residents per building even further (for all building levels) and artificially inflate that number to basically fool the player into believing it has a larger population than it actually does agent-wise.

Configurable Population Modifiers v1.2
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=652921941
I use it to jack up the level 5 residential and level 3 office buildings to more realistic numbers. You have figure out the equivalent figures to set for the actual capacity in game.. but I usually jack it up to like 150 per level5 res and 200 per level5 office or somewhere around there. I can't stand the fact vanilla has such low figures for level 5\3 buildings.